The stereotypical scientist is usually the one with the white coat who is clumsy and awkward!
He or she may not be very steady in spite of not having a drink of alcohol!
Butterfingers is his or her middle name!
But a keen curious scientific mind will compensate! A butterfinger scientist’s clumsiness is now responsible for one of the greatest inventions in glass!
Actually even Butterfingers has an interesting story!
A butterfingers is someone with a clumsy tendency to drop things they’re holding. Being a butterfingers is considered a particularly bad trait in baseball, for obvious reasons. The common use of this term by sportscasters in the 1920s inspired the name for the newly-invented candy known as Butterfinger!
One such butterfingers was Edward!
One fateful day in 1903, scientist Edward Benedictus was working in his lab when he accidentally knocked over a flask.
However, when Benedictus looked down, he noticed that rather than breaking into a million little pieces, the glassware had actually just cracked slightly while maintaining its shape!
Further investigation made him realize that a film had formed on the inside of the vessel! The vessel had contained an alcohol solution of collodion, a plastic made by treating cotton with a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids!
When the solvent evaporated, a film of plastic was left on the inside of the glass. An interesting observation but Benedictus thought no more of it until he read a story about a young girl being cut by glass in one of the first automobile accidents. He then spent the night trying to make a coating on glass and within a day had produced the first sheet of “safety glass” which he named “triplex” since it consisted of a sandwich of two sheets of glass with a film of cellulose nitrate in-between!
Even if the glass broke, the pieces were held in place by the plastic layer!
In 1909, Benedictus applied for a patent and triplex went into production. The first practical use turned out to be in the face shields of WW I gas masks, but by the 1920s triplex became a standard item in American automobiles!
One problem was that the cellulose nitrate yellowed with age. In 1933, triplex was replaced by cellulose acetate, which was not quite as strong but did not yellow. The synthetic resin, poly(vinyl butyral) eventually was found to be superior and has now been the standard in windshields since 1939.
And it all began when a chemist couldn’t hold on to a flask because of his butterfingers! And then we got the safety glass which is a class apart! A big class apart and very much loved by one and all was also Puneeth Rajkumar
aka Appu! He will not be forgotten for sure…
OM shanthi…
Shubh ratri!
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